Services, such as health care services, are often delivered by multiple practitioners, particularly in the case of healthcare services for patients with complex conditions. In some instances, multiple specialists collectively care for a patient with multiple co-morbidities, and a team of practitioners (surgeon, anesthesiologist, etc.) collectively provide service to a surgery patient.
The ability to assess each practitioner's value based on outcomes of care in such settings is important for effective care management and care improvement. It is a very challenging task since it is not straightforward to attribute the outcome of a collaborative effort to individual practitioners. This is particularly true since most of the time actions and degree of effort of each practitioner are not routinely recorded.
Currently, heuristic methods are used to attribute or assign patients (episodes) to practitioners. For example, in a single designation approach, the patient/episode is assigned to the practitioner who has seen the patient most in a multiple designation approach, assignment is based on the frequency or accumulated duration of visits.